Fabulously First!

Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Hi All! Yep, I am moving from first grade to kindergarten and it was a bit of a surprise for me too. Our small little school that I was in is moving hundreds of students into the new school and I was swept up in the move. My principal made the decision to take me with him and I got moved to kindergarten. At first I was upset because I was just getting so comfortable with first grade and I loved my team. Then I realized that half the team was going with me and that made it better. I am going from a school of about 600 students to a school that is twice as big. This is a brand new school and in all 30+ years of teaching I have never opened a new school. This should be exciting is so many different ways! We have seven K teachers so far and I have met some of them and the rest of them I am meeting tonight for dinner with just our little K group. I'm pretty sure I will be the oldest one there, but I am also young at heart. I love K and taught it for many years back before the common core stepped in and changed everything.

Bye Mustangs!

I also have to think quick about my blog and what am I going to do now? I have a blog that says "Fabulously First"! UGH! So I emailed Kassie and said "HELP, I need a new tagline and she took care of it right away. OK, so that changed the types of products I am going to be making for TpT just a little bit but I'm excited to be making new things since I haven't blogged in F o r e v e r! I am now following K blogs and in some really great blogging tribes on TPT. Looking forward to getting to know K bloggers and all things "K" again.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

My school is one of a few that has adopted an innovative model for parent-teacher partnerships. We started at the beginning of the year and it is going fantastic. It's called "Academic Parent Teacher Team" or APTT.

APTT replaces the traditional parent-teacher conference with three group meetings throughout the year, where teachers meet at once with all parents in their classroom. Each parent is provided with a folder of their child's performance indicators. Teachers then provide an in-depth coaching session on how to interpret the data based on overall classroom performance, school benchmarks, and state standards. Teachers provide the parents with strategies and tools to help support learning at home. Our goal this year is sight words (Dolch) for our grade level. I have started assessing my kids for the end of our first quarter and I'm blown away with a majority of my student's progress with their sight words and their fluency!!! Some of my students have improved by 50 to 80 sight words. Their reading levels have gone up right along as well. I can't wait to see what the end of this school year brings to all of us involved! I am so proud of my class for working so hard and for my families working together to make this all happen.

Click above to watch the video

Since our grade level is working on sight words I thought I would introduce you to a fantastic website called "Cram"! It is a website with more then 50 million flashcards and it now has a text-to-speech function. There are flashcard sets that are already created that you can use or you can create your own.

I went to the website and looked up the Dolch sight words and there are plenty of lists to use without me having to create my own.

There are several different ways that you can search on the website. I did two different searches; I searched by subject and then I searched with specific search words (dolch).

Click Here to visit the website!

The audio content of Cram has almost 20 languages for your non-english speaking students. You do not have to sign up, but it is quick and easy to do if you want to.

Cram also has a large app store so you can find other mobile flashcards for your Android, iPhone or Windows device.

Try it out and let me know what you think about Cram and if you are an APTT school also!

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